Riordan ups the ante for Kane kids

By Bryce Milligan

Updated
1:22 pm CDT, Friday, May 25, 2012

New York Times best selling author Rick Riordan signed his new book the Serpent's Shadow the final book in the Kane Chronicles series at Barnes and Noble in Anchorage, AK on Saturday, May 5, 2012. Riordan is the author of Percy Jackson, Kane Chronicles and Heroes of Olympus books for young readers as well as the award winning adult Tres Navarre mystery series.

New York Times best selling author Rick Riordan signed his new book the Serpent's Shadow the final book in the Kane Chronicles series at Barnes and Noble in Anchorage, AK on Saturday, May 5, 2012. Riordan is

New York Times best selling author Rick Riordan signed his new book the Serpent's Shadow the final book in the Kane Chronicles series at Barnes and Noble in Anchorage, AK on Saturday, May 5, 2012. Riordan is the author of Percy Jackson, Kane Chronicles and Heroes of Olympus books for young readers as well as the award winning adult Tres Navarre mystery series.

New York Times best selling author Rick Riordan signed his new book the Serpent's Shadow the final book in the Kane Chronicles series at Barnes and Noble in Anchorage, AK on Saturday, May 5, 2012. Riordan is

One of the things that makes Rick Riordan's mythological fantasy novels come to life so vividly is that they always have a firm grounding in familiar contemporary places.

The attentive reader can trace the action of several Percy Jackson novels on a New York street map (just as often on a highway map of the United States).

Although all of the novels in Riordan's “Kane Chronicles” have passages set in Egypt or in the Duat (the ancient Egyptian underworld), they also have plenty of very familiar locations. “The Throne of Fire,” second in the series, began in the Brooklyn Museum of Art. At the time of its publication, the San Antonio Museum of Art was featuring an exhibition of Egyptian artifacts on loan from the Brooklyn museum.

The third and final volume in the Kane series, “The Serpent's Shadow,” begins with a Texas connection as well.

Within the first few pages, in a battle of magic and wits, the Dallas Museum of Art and its adjoining sculpture garden are destroyed.

Lovely places, actually, but this is standard fare for Riordan's novels — they begin with a serious bang that shoves the reader off on a long roller-coaster ride.

Virtually all of the novels in both the “Percy Jackson series and the “Kane Chronicles” involve saving civilization as we know it.

As each series progresses, the stakes get a lot higher.

In “The Serpent's Shadow,” the ultimate enemy has risen, Apophis, or Chaos itself.

The only way to re-establish Ma'at, cosmic order, is to defeat a “force of nature” that is way beyond being merely a force of nature.

As the god of evil, Set, puts it: “Okay, I want to rule the world ... Of course. But that snake Apophis — he takes things too far. He wants to pull the whole of creation down into a big soupy primordial mess. Where's the fun in that?”

Our heroes are once again Sadie and Carter Kane. Now 14 and 15 respectively, both have the blood of pharaohs in their veins, and both are master magicians. Their mother is a shade, hiding somewhere in the Duat, attempting to avoid being sucked into eternal oblivion. Their father has morphed into the god Osiris. Sadie's protector (and just possibly her greatest interior threat) is the goddess Isis; Carter is connected to the hawk-headed warrior god, Horus.

The good guys are the magicians of the House of Life, but there have been a lot of losses in their ranks. Among the defenders are several new initiates — “ankle biters” as Carter calls them.

On the other side, Apophis has seduced an army of disgruntled magicians from around the world intent on wiping out the House of Life.

It is not a spoiler to say that Sadie and Carter are out of their depths this time.

For one thing, both characters are in love — of the teenage sort — which is a distraction at the best of times.

And, as there is in all of Riordan's novels, there is a deadline. Apophis will rise on the morning of the autumn equinox, which gives our heroes little more than a week to, well, save reality. An untried, complicated, long-lost incantation seems to be their only hope. But first it must be found.

Exactly how Riordan can pull off this general scenario time and again involves a bit of literary legerdemain that only a master mystery novelist could accomplish.

Fortunately, that's in Riordan's tool kit. So is intelligent humor, created mainly by a conjunction of conflicting attitudes and time periods.

Not just fast-paced adventure tales, these novels are full of pop culture allusions, homages and puns that juxtapose hilariously with all the Very Serious Ancient Secrets, the plethora of generally unfamiliar names, and the sense of impending cosmic doom. Adult, young adult or younger readers — anyone with a taste for well-written fantastic literature — will find Riordan's “Kane Chronicles” a delightful trilogy.

In case one gets lost in all the names, there is also “The Kane Chronicles Survival Guide.”

Actually, if one happens to be taking children to an Egyptian museum exhibit, this illustrated guide is a gem of succinct and interesting information on the extended pantheon of Egyptian mythology.

Bryce Milligan is the author of more than a dozen books, including several for children and young adults. He is also the publisher/ editor of Wings Press.